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In August, 1959, an anxious Bill Rueckert wrote Kenneth Burke to ask, When on earth is that perpetually forthcoming A Symbolic of Motives forthcoming? Will it be soon enough so that I can wait for it before I complete my book [Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations]? If the Symbolic is not forthcoming soon, would it be too much trouble for you to send me a list of exactly what will be included in the book, and some idea of the structure of the book? Burke replied, Holla! If you re uncomfortable, think how uncomfortable I am. But I ll do the best I can. . . . In the course of their long correspondence, the nature of the Symbolic Burke s much-anticipated third volume in his Motivorum trilogy vexed both men, and they discussed its contents often. Ultimately, Burke left the job of pulling it all together to Rueckert. Forty-eight years after they first discussed the Symbolic, Rueckert has fulfilled his end of the bargain with this book, Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950 1955. This collection contains the work Burke planned to include in the third book in his trilogy, which began with A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). In this book some of which appears here in print for the first time Burke offers his most precise and elaborated account of his dramatistic poetics, providing readers with representative analyses of such writers as Aeschylus, Goethe, Hawthorne, Roethke, Shakespeare, and Whitman. Following Rueckert s Introduction, Burke lays out his approach in essays that theorize and illustrate the method, which he considered essential for understanding language as symbolic action and human relations generally. Burke concludes with a focused account of humans as symbol-using and misusing animals and his tour de force reading of Goethe s Faust.

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